Tibetan blogging

Tweets from the plateau

A Tibetan blogger dares to challenge the party line

IN A recent posting on her blog, Tsering Woeser accused the authorities in Lhasa of carrying out racial segregation, welcoming Han Chinese visitors to the Tibetan capital but not Tibetans. “Has the world forgotten its boycott of governments that practised apartheid?” she fumed. As a chronicler of repression in Tibet, Ms Woeser has long been China’s most daring voice online, and a very rare one.

Ms Woeser’s dogged determination, despite close surveillance by security agents in Beijing where she lives with her (Han Chinese) husband, has kept open a rare window on conditions in Tibetan-inhabited areas. These have been largely off-limits to foreign journalists since riots in Lhasa in 2008. The 46-year-old writer scours the social media for titbits of news from the plateau, passing them on through her blog, “Invisible Tibet”, or on Twitter. Her postings are in Chinese, which has helped to raise awareness among non-Tibetans.

Both Twitter and her blog are blocked by China’s censors, but Ms Woeser bypasses the controls with firewall-leaping software. She has posted many updates to her nearly 30,000 Twitter followers about a spate of self-immolations by protesting Tibetans, including the two latest which reportedly occurred on August 13th in the town of Aba in Sichuan. More than 50 Tibetans have been killed or injured by self-immolation since February 2009.

The police often contact Ms Woeser to make their displeasure known. At politically sensitive times, she and her husband, Wang Lixiong, himself a Tibetologist and outspoken dissident, are sometimes kept under virtual house arrest. Yet Ms Woeser, who worked for a state-owned publication in Lhasa before falling foul of the authorities in 2004 because of her politically edgy writings, is undeterred. She also uses China’s home-grown version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, to post messages under a pseudonym. Several times, Ms Woeser says, censors have shut down her accounts.

Growing numbers of Tibetans are using Chinese microblogs, or weibo, writing in both Chinese and Tibetan. Ms Woeser says that on the Dalai Lama’s 77th birthday on July 6th, many posted congratulatory messages on weibo. Censors quickly deleted them, but the no-less vigilant Ms Woeser passed on several through her blog. She believes the censors employ ethnic Tibetans to help them.

Phoenix Weekly, a Hong Kong magazine, reported in June that China Tibet Online, a government portal, had given up plans to host Tibetan-language blogs because of the difficulty of censoring postings. It said efforts to develop the sophisticated software needed to sniff out sensitive content in Chinese were being hampered by a lack of proper vocabulary databases in Tibetan and other ethnic-minority languages. But it added that the police were testing an internet monitoring system they think will help them.

Officials believe there are threats aplenty. A recent paper by academics and a police official in the north-western city of Lanzhou said the number of Tibetan internet users was growing “exponentially”, adding that this could provide a conduit for “harmful information”. Ironically, a Chinese state-owned company could be helping the information flow. According to China Daily, a Beijing-based newspaper, China Telecom launched the first Tibetan-language smartphone in June. This, it said, had received an “enthusiastic reception”, with some 700 sold so far.